I get your point but a lowball assumes malicious intent to misvalue something or someone based on market value. Market value of a no name employee is am art, not a science. Offering 60k would have been a lowball, offering a standard salary for a specific role/level is not a lowball.

I am pretty sure you're competitive but Google doesn't five a fuck. It doesn't need good engineers to do the work now. It's becoming AWS or sth that needs more and more work force rather than high quality engs.

It sounds crazy.. but Google is still a good choice, there are plenty of interesting projects and internal resources. And you have the freedom to explore or initiate sth .. but Google really sucks in perf and team matching. If you joined, you'd find that it's SO much easier to switch to a team you are interested in(but typically after one year) and you have better sense that what they are actually doing..Google is the only job I have ever had so maybe I have bias. But I do have many FANG friends. I feel that it's fair to say the above. The problem is that they don't want to give you L5 which makes your package significantly lower than expectation. It's a normal package for L4.

Btw, Google is a much better place to work than FB or NFLX, and Google recruiters know it. In a recent Blind poll, 92% of Netflixers, 76% of Amazonians and 46% of FB'ers are afraid of being fired. That should show you the toxicity of their cultures. At Google, that number is 16%.

It's not and wasn't :). Would never trust a blind poll on anything. Sanity check your own numbers: 92% of Netflix is afraid of being fired? That is possibly true in your mind lol? 92% of people barely like ice cream...

Netflix's culture deck explicitly states "average performers receive severance packages." Meanwhile, Amazon is well known for its forced attrition policy of firing the 10% bottom performers every year, as verified by many Blind posts.

To refute a claim backed by evidence with personal attacks and without any evidence constitutes ad hominem. Who is dumb here?

The number is 76% at Amazon, not 92%. It's not ridiculous at all. Everyone without an EE performance rating could justifiably fear it. When everyone is doing their best and less than 10% of people actually suck, the PIP's can be somewhat random and political

I will admit that the sample sizes in the poll may not be significant for a p-value of 0.05 in statistically testing the hypothesis that FB's SWE PIP fear rate is higher than that of the average, for all companies in the poll. However, for Amazon and Netflix it obviously is without even running the numbers.

EDIT: percentages may be slightly off because I last calculated them when that poll was published, memorized them and haven't recalculated since. But they're not far off

Isn't like 90% of Google's revenue still coming from ads? They're pretty diverse in terms of products they've built out, but it doesn't seem like something they'd continue long term if they continue to be unprofitable, or at least not directing revenue to their money maker.